Lata Mangeshkar
1929 – 2022 · India
Known for: Indian playback singer whose voice carried Hindi cinema for eight decades
“For eight decades her voice was the sound of India singing.”
Biography
Lata Mangeshkar was born in Indore in 1929, the eldest child of Deenanath Mangeshkar, a classical singer and actor of the Marathi and Konkani stage. She was given the name Hema at birth and renamed after Latika, a character in one of her father's plays. Her first music lessons came from him, and by the age of five she was appearing in his musical dramas. When he died in 1942 she was thirteen, and the family lost the income that she, as the eldest, now had to replace. A friend of the house, the film producer known as Master Vinayak, brought her into the studios, and when his company moved to Bombay in 1945 she went with it, continuing her training in Hindustani classical music under Ustad Aman Ali Khan while taking the small acting parts she never enjoyed.
Her voice was at first judged too thin for the screen. The composer Ghulam Haider thought otherwise, and the song he gave her in Majboor in 1948 settled the argument. Over the decades that followed Mangeshkar recorded in more than thirty six Indian languages, chiefly Hindustani, Bengali and Marathi, and became the voice audiences expected whenever an actress on screen began to sing. She worked with an exacting discipline: she recorded barefoot, holding the studio to be a temple, and she never listened to her songs once they were released, saying she would hear nothing in them but her own mistakes. After four Filmfare awards for best female playback singer she asked to be left out of the category so that younger voices could win it. In 1974 she became the first Indian playback singer to appear at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
Honours followed her to the end: the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 1989, the Bharat Ratna in 2001, which made her only the second singer to receive India's highest civilian decoration, and the rank of officer in the French Legion of Honour in 2009. Guinness World Records listed her for years as the most recorded artist in history, a place later taken by her sister Asha Bhosle. She was still recording in her eighties, so that her working life covered eight decades of Indian film music. Mangeshkar died in Mumbai on 6 February 2022 at the age of ninety two, after several weeks in hospital, and the country declared national mourning and gave her a state funeral. What remains is not a monument but a habit of listening, in the memory of hundreds of millions of people who never met her.